Hard Old Life, part iv

Mother,

I was watching my dog this morning and thought of you.

Jinx is his name, and I’ll risk saying something foolish and declare that I think you’d like him if you knew him. He’s goofy and affectionate and spastic, with eyebrows that Laurence Olivier would envy in their expressiveness. He’s the clumsiest dog I’ve ever seen, and the most graceful when he leaps and runs, seeming to be more deer than dog. He spends long periods sitting in front of me, staring into my eyes, and if I put a blanket across him when he’s on the floor, he falls asleep in about eight seconds, which is why I think of him as a rodeo napper. He sheds terribly, chases cows no matter how I admonish him, and has brought me enough shoes from the surrounding farms to stock a lesser dictator’s wife’s closet.

Why would I think of you, Mother, while watching this Virginia dingo? Well, a couple of things.

First, Jinx has a hiding place where he goes. It’s place in the barbed-wire fence next to the house where the bottom strand of wire is somewhat higher off the ground, just between two diagonal cross-braces. Whenever one of us arrives home, Jinx will race like a greyhound up to this spot and slip under the fence and disappear into the woods there, yipping his keening foxhunt call, carrying on as if he juuuuuust missed some demonic intruder. We’ve examined the area but have never been able to determine what it is about this spot in the woods that Jinx finds so fascinating. We’ve come to call this area the Baskervilles….do you remember watching that old Basil Rathbone movie with me on tv when I was a teenager? Remember how we always watched horror and mystery movies on Friday nights on our old b&w television set?

Anyway, Jinx’s secret hiding place made me think back to the hiding place I had when I was about seven or eight. Do you remember, Mother?

We had a television antenna outside our little rental house. The pole was secured to the side of the house by a clamp, and sometimes when we had poor reception on a program, you would send me outside to twist the pole from side to side until the picture cleared. Later, we augmented the outdoor areal with rabbit ears atop the set. With tin foil on the tips.

I learned that I could shimmy up the aluminum pole and get up onto the roof. A magnolia tree outside the front bedroom overhung the house, its glossy green leaves drooping down and providing a dark canopy over a section of the roof. A perfect cave.

There’s something mystical about a child’s hiding place, a place where he can watch the mean old world without it being able to get to him, a place where he can feel stronger than the sum of his many weaknesses, weaknesses that are always on display when he is among other people. A place where he can talk to himself, or to God, and he can read and hum songs that he’s learned, or perhaps enjoy a secret snack.

Once I discovered the rooftop magnolia cave, I went up there often. My favorite thing to do was take a library book or a comic book with me, along with any snack I could purloin — a stick of leftover cornbread, say — and climb the pole and hid inside the green gloom and nibble on my cornbread and turn the pages of my book, lying at that forty degree angle, my head up and my feet down, the gritty asphalt shingles beneath my blonde head, the sound of blue jays near me. It was my own little monastery, where I was secluded and cloistered and hidden, reading the holy books of my age and communing with the only Father I knew or needed.

One evening while you were cooking supper, you looked over at me as I sat at the kitchen table, reading.

“I heard something funny today,” you said.

I knew your vocal patterns well enough to know that you weren’t going to tell me an amusing anecdote about a neighbor or a hilarious scenario that occurred in the school lunchroom where you worked for nine hot hours every day. I knew something of weight was about to settle down on me. I put my book aside and watched you, waiting.

“I heard you were climbin’ around on the roof.” You put the spatula down and turned to face me. “On the roof. Of this house!”

I didn’t say anything.

“Well, did you?” you said, your voice a bit strident.

I looked you right in the eye and did what came so easily. “No, ma’am,” I lied. “No, ma’am.”

Do you remember that moment, Mother? You stared at me for a long time, and in this present moment, I believe you knew I was lying, but you neither wanted to believe it nor wanted to believe that I was in the habit of scampering around twelve or fifteen feet off the unforgiving ground.

“All right, then,” you said, turning back to the stove. “Don’t ever let me catch you up on that roof, son.”

But catch me you did. It was probably a week or two later. I was secluded in my rooftop cave, reading and enjoying the untouched afternoon solitude, when I dropped my book. It was a library book, bound in that slick transparent material that covers library books, and it began to skitter away from me, down through the leaves of the magnolia, down towards the edge of the roof. It had been raining that morning, and the yard below was wet and muddy. The book would be damaged, and Miss LaFouche, the librarian, didn’t much like me anyway. I had to grab the book before it went over.

I thumped on my butt, feet first, like an upside down leapfrogger, chasing the sliding book in its terrible slow-motion descent. About two feet from the edge, I hooked the book with my heel, stomping down on it to stop its progress, and I exhaled with relief.

And that’s when you stepped into my line of vision, down on the ground, your hands on your aproned hips, your blue eyes burning into me with enough force to shatter all the television sets in the entire town.

“Get down here right now,” you hissed at me.

I started to obey, but I dropped the book on the asphalt shingles, and I cried out as it skittered down and away and took flight like a paper bird and landed open and page-down in a puddle the size of a washtub.

You took a switch to my legs when I got back on the ground, and I sat on the back steps crying. I never again went up on the roof, and I never again had such a perfect place in which to be alone and think my thoughts and read my books and nibble on a piece of cold, delicious cornbread.

And I hope Jinx enjoys the Baskervilles as much as I enjoyed my cool shine of magnolia leaves mantled over that little gray roof.

Oh, shoot, Mother. I got distracted in remembering the roof incident, and I forgot to tell you the second reason I was reminded of you while watching Jinx this morning.

I thought of you because it occurred to me that I don’t think you liked dogs.

You allowed Sissy and me to have only one dog for our entire childhood, a beautiful German Shepherd named King, but he died young of cancer, so he wasn’t a large presence to me. You never let him inside the house even once, not even when he was sick and fading. He always slept in his dog house beneath the pear tree in the tiny back yard.

You never talked of dogs from your childhood except mad dogs, rabid creatures that had to be put down with guns. When you would see a dog on a television show, you would mutter, “I wouldn’t let that nasty dog in my house.”

And so I wonder…did you have a genuine hostility to dogs, or were you simply repelled by their lack of the sort of odorless daintiness that cats possess? Did something happen to you when you were a girl that turned you against canines? I wish I had made this realization when you were still alive, and I wish I  had asked you about it. As with all the other Mother Mysteries, this one’s answer will have to await our reunion, until I finish up my time here and travel over to where you are.

I still have to say it, though. I think you’d have liked Jinx, Mother. He would have made you laugh. He can steal a stick of cornbread faster than a book can fall off a roof.

 

~ S.K. Orr